China has reported nearly 110,000 HIV/AIDS cases so far this year, a slight increase over last year, said the nation's top AIDS specialist. The gay male population has been hit particularly hard, accounting for more than 25% of the total.

Wu Zunyou, head of the National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, made the remarks on the sidelines of the ongoing 2015 National Conference on HIV/AIDS. In worse-hit cities such as Beijing and Harbin, more than 70% of the cases reported in 2015 involved gay men, he added. Worse, young students have been hit hard in recent years by the epidemic, he said, and 70-80% of the HIV/AIDS cases detected in 2015 among them involved gay sex.

Thanks to robust intervention efforts initiated in 2003, China has a low prevalence of HIV/AIDS (0.06 percent), according to Shen Jie, deputy director of the Chinese Association of STD and AIDS Prevention and Control, which hosted the conference. "But the rapid increase of HIV cases among gay men has hardly been curbed," she said. Read more via China Daily